Fluffy The Vampire Spayer

So how about that Beverly Hills Chihuahua movie, huh? Seriously, am I right?

Like all adults who are not pod people, I was filled with rage upon seeing the trailers for that film. Not just because it used hundreds of millions of dollars worth of CGI to create legions of my least favorite domestic animal in the middle of an Incan temple (how did they get to Peru?), performing the whitest rap since Bea Arthur sang “Do The Urkel”, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mexican-Americans need to be oppressed much harder so they’ll stop embracing their most negative stereotypes. It was more than that.

It was that the animation was gorgeous.

The models themselves weren’t that impressive, but there’s this one scene where a dog jumps up in front of the camera and yells CHA-WA-WA~! and it just looks like pure Muppet. We’ve brought CGI to the point where we can actually simulating having a human hand inside an animal’s head. Why are we wasting this technology on such expensive ephemeral garbage when there are so many wonderful talking animal stories to be brought to life? Where’s my Cricket in Times Square movie? What about The Great Cheese Conspiracy? Could The Eleventh Hour be done justice as a film? And what about… uh… what about…

…Oh my.

Here’s one of the all-time classics of my generation, and probably the generations preceding and following as well. It almost seems superfluous to describe this book since just about everyone I ever knew seemed to have read it, not to mention that its title gives you an excellent idea of what goes down in the book in general. If you’re a new reader or a Martian, though, I’ll hold your tentacle and walk you through it.

The Monroe family, mom and dad and two boys, have two pets, Chester the cat and Harold the dog (who is also the narrator). One night they come home with a shoebox full of dirt containing a tiny, quivering bunny, whom they name ‘Bunnicula’ because they found him in one of the theater seats at a Dracula movie. This name turns out to be quite appropriate, to Chester’s horror and Harold’s glib indifference.

There are about seven Bunnicula books, and they have a certain formula. Harold and Chester’s comfortable pet lives are interrupted by a change in their situation, and Chester, a hungry reader himself with an overactive imagination, immediately places the blame on the supernatural. Harold dubiously follows him in his efforts to defeat the perceived menace, only to find that there is no actual menace and it was just the humans being unpredictable as usual. In later books they’re joined by Howie, a dachshund puppy who believes everything Chester says, but doesn’t necessarily take it seriously. This is important because Chester is always, always wrong.

Except the first time. Chester is absolutely right in his assertion that Bunnicula is a vampire. However, he also assumes Bunnicula is a threat to the members of the animal kingdom in the house, and there’s never any suggestion of that from his behavior. Bunnicula is a vegetarian vampire: when everyone’s gone to sleep, he mists his way through the cage and goes to the fridge to find victims in the crisper drawer. He drains the juice from them and hops back to bed, leaving ghost-white vegetable jerky in his wake.

How do you thwart a vegetarian vampire? According to Chester, it’s simple; pound a steak through his heart. Har har.

Bunnicula is the first example I’ve seen of the trope of vegetarian monsters, but it’s far from the last. One of the very best was the 2006 film Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, featuring Wallace and Gromit. Its creators referred to it as “the world’s first vegetarian horror film,” and they’re technically correct in that it’s the first  one released worldwide. If you want the very first one ever made, though, look no further than this unreleased 1982 Hammer featurette…